It’s All On the Inside

I’m ramping up.

Fortunately, the only person who can tell is me. I still sit at the computer throughout much of the day, I don’t talk any faster than usual, and I haven’t been spending large amounts of money (well, I’ve been spending a little too much, but it’s for fun things like items for the trip and eating out). My room needs to be cleaned and there’s laundry to be done. But inside my head, there is boundless energy and my thoughts race constantly, making it difficult to go to sleep at night or concentrate on writing during the day. I feel like I could jog all the way to Texas and back…it’s my body that says “Nope”.

This is what a friend of mine calls “medicated mania”, and it’s totally normal for me at this time of the year. (Which is why I’m not worried about it—it almost always resolves on its own.) Early fall is optimistic; the leaves are turning to red and orange and yellow; there are Halloween decorations in the stores; days are still golden with sun and blue skies but there’s a nip in the morning air that wasn’t there a week ago. I notice the sharp decrease in the angle of the light, but it only makes me want to nest instead of causing me to feel depressed. I haven’t even started light therapy yet, even though it’s been cloudy and rainy for the past couple of days and this usually plunges me into a funk immediately.

Not that I’ll be shocked if/when my SAD does kick in, of course. That’s almost inevitable in the late fall and winter months. Thank God my family and I have a wonderful trip coming up in the middle of December. We have been waiting for it since August of last year, and now it’s only 84 days till the start of our vacation. Time is passing very quickly; it seems to me that the last four months of a given year go by as if it were four weeks. We can hardly wait!

Then there’s the fact that my second wedding anniversary without Will is coming up in a week. I am NOT looking forward to it, for obvious reasons. But this year, I’m remembering the good things…how exciting it was to be his bride, anticipating our wedding and being so in love it almost hurt. We were married in a public park, but I wore the traditional white dress and veil, and he wore a blue tuxedo (well, it was the beginning of the ’80s, what can I say?). Our minister was a good friend of ours who had a mail-order divinity degree and whom we paid in marijuana for performing the ceremony. The cake was homemade and looked it, we had people visiting the park who crashed the wedding, and even the tape recording our vows got tangled up in the middle of it and we lost the whole thing.

And it was the best. wedding. ever.

These are the good times I’m remembering now, instead of the sadness of the last few months of Will’s life and the brutality of his final hours. I’ve come to terms with the fact that he is gone and I’ve stopped looking for him around every corner. I still hate it that he isn’t here to celebrate our 37th anniversary. But I’ve come to accept it, and for my own peace of mind it’s better that way.

So here I am, with my mind saying GO while the body says NO. It’s OK though. What the heck, I’m enjoying life, and I know he would want that.